Cover Story: Hurricane Sandy’s Election

“Where I was in Brooklyn, I don’t think I would have even known that there was a major storm happening,” says Adrian Tomine, the artist of next week’s cover, “Undeterred.” He continues,

So I spent the whole night glued to the Internet and watching everything unfolding, just being shocked that this kind of dramatic destruction was happening just miles outside my home. And I started thinking about how it would affect the election. This is a first for me in terms of doing a cover that’s topical with a quick turnaround, and somehow these two significant events just came together into that one image for me.

Tomine adds,

For all its really horrible effects, I feel like the storm has made real a lot of issues in the election that were hypothetical, that were thrown around as debate topics—global warming; and Is Obama enough of a leader to handle a natural disaster?; and Do we need FEMA? It’s really interesting, and in a way useful, to see a lot of these things become actual issues that are right at hand.